


The Starlit Road

by ishafel



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-08
Updated: 2011-02-08
Packaged: 2017-10-15 12:42:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn't all bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Starlit Road

They are thirty miles outside London when the Daimler's engine falls out of the automobile and lands in the road with an awful and final thud. Tom is so startled that he accelerates instead of braking-- and the big car leaps forward as if it were being shot from a cannon. Only now, it runs utterly silently.

Beside him, Merope laughs as the wind blows her veil away and tangles her hair into witch's knots. She is not like any girl he's ever known. His friends all say that she's bewitched him, his ploughman's daughter with the workworn hands and plain face and midnight eyes. They see only her shyness, her plainness, the poverty in which she was brought up. She is not like the glittering girls of their set, taught to dance before they can walk, taught languages and arts and fancies and nothing common or sensible.

They do not see her kindness, her gentleness, her love of rain and speed and wild places and broken things. She keeps herself for Tom alone, because unlike the rest of them she has nothing to prove. He takes her right hand in hers, and squeezes it, and she turns and smiles at him like he's something she's been searching for all of her life and only just found. That's how he always feels, when he's with her, like he's a miracle: like he's her miracle.

They should be stuttering to a stop, slewing across the road, sliding into the hedges. But Tom presses the accelerator down until it rests against the floorboards and the Daimler glides on, so fast now that the needle of the speedometer is flush with the edge of the dial. The countryside goes by in a blur of green and the world seems bright and clean and unexplored and inexplicable. It feels like flying; it feels like magic. He smiles back at Merope and he thinks how much he loves her, and he wishes things would always be this way.


End file.
